I don't have any inside information or anything like that, but...they are hiring him to extend his previous research on large-scale machine learning systems. A

I don't have any inside information or anything like that, but...they are hiring him to extend his previous research on large-scale machine learning systems. As the lab head, I imagine he won't have a hard time getting resources--they must have given him something like a startup package to lure him there. As a big name, they have a strong incentive to keep him happy: if he were to leave in a justifiable huff (e.g., "they promised me tons of compute and all I got were these Fire Phones"), it would make recruiting much harder.